Contrary to popular belief, the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was not about the colonists’ opposition to taxation. It was a rebellion against taxation controlled by the British Parliament, rather than by the colonists. It was also a protest against the generous tax break that Parliament was giving the East India Co., which shipped the tea. Illustration by Nathaniel Currier, 1846. Source: The Springfield Museums.
My name is Todd Oppenheimer, and I’m one of 200 high-net-worth members of the Patriotic Millionaires. We usually write our weekly “Closer Look” newsletter in the collective voice of all our members, but this week the organization gave me the pen for a new offering we’ve started called “A Member Spotlight,” which offers a deep dive into issues around economic inequality from the perspective of one of our millionaire members.
This assignment was particularly appealing to me because of a convenient coincidence. I’ve been a journalist for nearly 50 years, and this January I launched a series of columns on economic issues leading up to the coming midterm elections. The columns, published once a month, explore what I call “The Craft of a Sustainable Economy.” (The series title relates to a multimedia magazine, Craftsmanship, which I publish through The Craftsmanship Initiative, a public-service venture I founded in 2015. The Initiative’s magazine profiles artisans and innovators whose work informs the venture’s mission: “Create a World Built to Last.”)
My own attitude toward taxes was forged a long time ago. When I was growing up, in a West Coast family with some wealth, I took on a value system that I thought was so logical and so obvious that everyone followed it. One could say it comes from none other than the King James Bible (in Luke 12:48), where it’s described roughly as follows: “From whom much is given, much is expected.” The legendary 19th-century French writer Honore de Balzac echoed the same values, calling them noblesse oblige—the obligations of the nobility.
I’ve always seen this worldview as a kind of moral math—a basic formula for how an evolved society should function. So it’s always struck me as bizarre when I see some of my wealthy peers hoard their riches rather than share them. Then, in 2019, when I discovered Patriotic Millionaires, I suddenly realized that I’d found my people, and my moral home. So my decision to join as a member was an easy one.
Over the months that I’ve been writing this column, it’s struck me that much of our political strife these days stems from one basic problem: most of America’s billionaires, or at least those we hear from, don’t understand that old biblical principle that’s always guided me. They don’t even understand basic economic arithmetic. When you listen to what they say these days about taxes, it seems like the billionaire class, along with their political enablers, suffer from a psychic disease that might be called blind spotitis.
MAKING UP NUMBERS
Consider one of economics’ most basic number questions: When a business makes money, how much should go to the government as tax payments? And how much should the business’s owners and investors keep for themselves? A prevailing belief among the politicians in control of our government at the moment is that taxes should be as low as possible. After all, they argue, business owners earned their profits, and they need that income to expand their operations and create new jobs.
This is a blind spot on several levels.
First, most U.S. businesses have not reinvested much of their extra income into business expansion, new jobs, or higher wages. Instead, they have passed more and more of those profits to their executives and investors, through dividends, stock buybacks and various loopholes embedded in the tax code.
To Peter Thiel (the multibillionaire co-founder of PayPal and data analysis giant Palantir, and an early investor in Facebook), the main purpose of low taxes is to keep America competitive with other countries. “When you have marginal tax rates at 40 or 50 percent in the U.S., and they’re at 10 or 15 percent in other countries, we are at an increasing competitive disadvantage,” Thiel once said.
There’s one small problem with Thiel’s argument: His numbers are entirely made up.
What are the real numbers among our primary competitors? The truest representation of this class, along with China, are the 38 relatively wealthy nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). In this group, the average top corporate tax rate was 24.20 percent (in 2025), and the average top personal income tax rate, as of 2022, was roughly 42 percent. (These averages include tax rates in the U.S., which also belongs to the OECD.) China is even more aggressive, imposing a corporate tax rate of 25 percent, and personal income tax rates that top out at 45 percent.
Those high taxes pay off. After tallying the portion of economic growth its members collect in tax revenue, the OECD found that most of the world’s wealthiest countries rank near the top. Yet the U.S., as can be seen in the chart below, ranks near the bottom, flailing around with countries in Latin America and elsewhere that show signs of struggling economic and social health.
WEAKENING FOUNDATIONS FOR GROWTH
Source: OECD Revenue Statistics 2024 – the United States
If you think our low tax rate is actually a sign of America’s strength—of how wise we’ve been to let industry rather than government steer our economic ship—think again. A new set of OECD surveys, called the “Foundations for Growth and Competitiveness,” shows that our low tax structure has actually weakened the U.S. on numerous fronts. While we dominate in a few areas, such as private support for social services and lifelong learning programs, we trail most other developed countries on the strength of our financial institutions; our general “macro-economic stability;” regulation of our transportation infrastructure; protections against corruption in public decision-making; entrepreneurial support to reduce insolvencies; energy efficiency and environmentally sustainable infrastructure; labor mobility; and pension and retirement programs. Perhaps most apropos, given our current president’s approach to international trade, the U.S. has one of the most excessive tariff barriers among all 38 OECD countries.
Cartoon by Joe Heller. Used by permission of The Craftsmanship Initiative.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS
The U.S. has not always been such an outlier. Once upon a time, primarily from the 1940s through the 1960s (propelled by the widespread patriotism provoked by WWII), the majority of Americans saw it as their duty, and an act of civic pride, to pay the taxes asked of them to support the national cause. That attitude enabled U.S. political leaders to create a much fairer tax system, with the wealthy paying progressively higher rates commensurate with their levels of income. Not coincidentally, that tax structure operated during the peak of America’s economic strength (as I explained in Part 5 of this series).
Technically, we still have progressive income taxes, at least on the federal level, but that system has become a thin shadow of its former self. Back in 1978, the U.S. had up to 34 different personal income tax brackets, ranging from zero to 70 percent, along with graduating tiers for corporate income taxes that topped out at 48 percent. Today, we have only seven personal income tax brackets. They range from 10 percent to a meager 37 percent—nearly half what they were in 1978.
Meanwhile, U.S. corporations have been given a double treat. In 2017, with President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, they were freed of tiered rates entirely. They are now all asked to pay a flat rate of 21 percent. Although that’s almost half what the top corporate rate once was, it hasn’t satisfied our myopic corporate executives. Over the last decade, thanks to all the loopholes and escape hatches that have crept into today’s tax code, U.S. corporations have found ways to pay a tax rate that recently averaged around 12 percent. Between 2018 and 2021, the number of companies paying percentages in the single digits almost doubled, from 56 to 95. And by 2025, 88 profitable corporations paid no taxes at all.
This long, painful history shines a hot light on a controversial measure appearing on the California ballot this November—a one-time, 5 percent tax on the state’s billionaires called Proposition 40. Unprecedented on American soil, and untried anywhere else in the world in its form and scope, Prop 40 will provide a telling test of the ultra-wealthy’s ability to persuade people that 2+2 actually doesn’t equal 4.
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
What’s most curious about our patterns of inequality is that the personal and community damage they’ve caused have been part of America’s public debate for a long time. Sen. Bernie Sanders has talked about almost nothing else for more than a decade. So why do we keep swallowing the flawed logic that billionaires and their adulators keep throwing at us about the disaster that would occur if corporations and the ultra-wealthy paid higher taxes?
This question provokes an endless cascade of answers, ranging from billionaire greed and corporate dominance of political advertising, to credulous voters who believe higher taxes on billionaires will somehow hurt them, too. These explanations all have merit, but they miss the deeper problem. I think our reluctance to raise taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy is psychological, driven by our innate fear of change.
Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston, Illinois, and current candidate for Illinois’ 9th congressional district, touches on this idea. In his view, today’s economic paralysis stems from what he calls “status quo bias.” It’s like that old cliché—better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know. After all, we’ve been living with today’s economic devil for decades; during that time, Congress has gradually refined and added to the tax code’s devilish ways, turning working Americans into the proverbial frogs in boiling water.
Pardon the pile of metaphors, but they make a point. The devil that most of us don’t know—the new laws needed to return the tax code to its former strength—would not creep up on us. It would hit suddenly, with consequences that can feel unpredictable and frightening. And nothing creates better fodder for political attack ads than fear of the economic unknown.
But think about this for a moment. That devil we’ve gotten so used to is a tax system so unfair that it has helped the U.S. develop one of the worst records in the developed world on income inequality. Today, when that level of inequality is coupled with gutting government programs that help the less fortunate, it’s no wonder that the U.S. also has one of the world’s worst records on illegal drug use; on infant mortality, obesity and overall health; on incarceration rates; and on job stress and work-life balance.
I don’t know about you, but I’d happily trade that track record for the economic devil you may not know personally, but which history knows quite well: tax rates close to what we had in the mid-20th century, a period when prosperity was so widespread it’s often called the “Golden Age of Capitalism.”
